CONCEIVING THREE children while you’re alive is challenging enough. Imagine doing so after you’re dead!

It’s a mind-boggling proposition — precisely the point of this column. Still, modern reproductive technologies have made postmortem parenting “conceivable.” Children have been born from genetic material collected from dead people, giving birth to weighty moral and legal questions.

This month, it was widely reported that a Texas woman obtained a court order to retrieve sperm from her 21-year-old deceased son, Nikolas. He had died on April 5 after suffering a devastating head injury during a fight.

According to The Associated Press, the mother had decided that Nikolas’ dream of having three sons (for whom he had “already picked out names”) was not going to die with him. With the assistance of a probate judge and an urologist, she was able to obtain her deceased son’s testicular tissue and, consequently, secure the possibility for future children to be conceived from his sperm.

Ultimately, her plan would also require some form of in-vitro fertilization using a woman’s donated egg, and, of course, a surrogate’s womb to nurture and carry each fetus to term.

Nikolas’ mother reportedly intends to raise the children after they’re born. She explained to the media that she was only doing what Nikolas had desired: “My son wanted to graduate from college. He wanted to have children. And someone took that away from him.”

Certainly, most judges and doctors would be empathically attuned to this mother’s terrible grief over the loss of her son and the shock of his sudden and unexpected death. They would understand her heartache and existential pain, but they would also know, in all humility, that her core suffering would remain incurable despite any court ruling, pill, or medical machinery.

And yet, the particular judge and doctor involved in this case responded to the mother’s suffering with the offerings of modern medical technology. That allowed them — and the mother — to “do something” if even they could do nothing at all about the real problem of Nikolas being dead.

That’s how it often is when death confronts us. It’s easier to be distracted by the wizardry of medical technology than to confront both head-on and heart-on the mysteries of death. It is an ill-conceived approach to our great human predicament, and it is profoundly American in nature.

By now, many — but not all — in this country have become accustomed to the idea of organ donation, in which body parts are removed from cadavers for organ and tissue transplantation. But that differs significantly from “posthumous sperm retrieval” in that transplanted organs are used to prolong the survival of already-existing human beings — not to conceive brand-new life, not to place children in the world who are conceived from a dead parent.

Also, we’ve had some time for public discussion and contemplation about organ donation; adults can even register as donors now online or at the DMV. In contrast, people don’t regularly imagine the possibility of their reproductive organs being removed from their dead bodies to conceive future children they will never know. And that is precisely why Nikolas’ dream cannot be equated with his mother’s current enactment — her version of his dream was thoroughly unimaginable to Nikolas all along. It is not his dream that she acts out now.

The desire to become a father during one’s life is radically different from the desire to conceive and birth children after one’s death. When Nikolas dreamed of being a parent, he also must have dreamed of three boys looking to him as their father — not to his own mother or to the legacy of his absence.

Nikolas never gave consent for his body to be used in the unimagined manner that was permitted by the court and urologist.

Posthumous sperm retrieval from cadavers is not new. It has been practiced for decades and 1980 witnessed the first known successful birth of a child from this procedure. It has inspired narrative plots in popular media, most recently in the TV series “Ugly Betty” in which a woman used her dead husband’s semen to create a child who would inherit his empire. A few days ago, a New York judge granted permission for a woman to retrieve her dead fiance’s sperm with the intention of birthing his child.

It may constitute a “medical wonder” when (and if) children are born from Nikolas’ stored testicular tissue. But it should also generate considerable human wondering.

For such children, what might be the psychological effects of knowing they were deliberately created from a non-consenting dead man’s sperm? Who can use your body for purposes that you’ve never preconceived? Why are such great moral issues about human death and reproduction being settled — unevenly — one judge, one court, one patient, or one doctor at a time in this country? Why does medical innovation so easily outpace our willingness to grapple with the full scope of its human consequences?

Last month, Canada passed federal legislation requiring a man’s explicit, antemortem, written consent for the postmortem retrieval of his sperm. Canadian doctors are encouraging men to document their decisions about postmortem sperm retrieval in a manner similar to documenting wishes about organ donation.

That law does not address all of the complex questions birthed by postmortem conception or new reproductive technologies, but it at least raises those issues to national consciousness for public reflection. It also makes us pause, if only for a moment, to realize how intimately — and often inconceivably — medical technology progressively inserts into our experiences of life and death.

The seven adult children of David and Louise Turpin, the couple accused of abusing and imprisoning them for years at their Perris home, have been released from the hospital, their attorney said Monday.

The law and responding challenge set up a confrontation sought by abortion opponents, who are hoping federal courts will ultimately prohibit abortions before a fetus is viable. Current federal law does not.